The invention relates to recombinant plant nucleic acids and polypeptides and uses thereof to confer disease resistance to pathogens in transgenic plants.
Plants employ a variety of defensive strategies to combat pathogens. One defense response, the so-called hypersensitive response (HR), involves rapid localized necrosis of infected tissue. In several host-pathogen interactions, genetic analysis has revealed a gene-for-gene correspondence between a particular avirulence (avr) gene in an avirulent pathogen that elicits an HR in a host possessing a particular resistance gene.